Michael Armstrong – BTC: 1F2LWbpYMBeXhbZDEeY7e7G99rSipyAYL7

macbook

On 9th March 2015, Apple announced (among other things…) an all new MacBook, I won’t go into the marketing details as you’ll find those everywhere else. Essentially however its an ultra low power, ultra light, 12″ MacBook with a Retina Display. As a heavy 11″ MacBook Air user I can confidently say I think they’ve really pulled it out the bag this time.

Firstly looking at the overall dimensions of the 12″ MacBook I was very surprised to see its smaller than the 11″ Air (just about) in every dimension, whilst also being lighter and having a 1″ bigger display.

Device

Height

Width

Depth

Weight

2014 MacBook Air 11″

0.11-0.68″ (0.3-1.7 cm)

11.8″ (30 cm)

7.56″ (19.2 cm)

2.38 lb (1.08 kg)

2015 MacBook 12″ Retina

0.14-0.52″ (0.35-1.31 cm)

11.04″ (28.05 cm)

7.74″ (19.65 cm)

2.03 lb (0.92 kg)

To summarise, the thinnest part of the MacBook is thicker than the thinnest part of an Air by 0.05 cm (which perhaps is a good thing if you’ve seen how thin and almost transparent the MacBook Air 11″ display is) and its slightly deeper, apart from that its almost identical in its dimensions, which is great if (like me) you’ve invested in bags/sleeves and the likes, all your non-technical accessories will still work.

Additionally its battery life estimates and tech specs are very comparable if not identical to the battery in the 11″ MacBook Air. Meaning you get your retina display without any compromise… Except one…

The next part of this post is purely speculation until proper benchmarks arrive, however, after some digging into the Intel Core M, i’ve noticed only 5 Broadwell architecture CPU’s exist and one in particular matches the top spec CPU mentioned by Tim Cook in the Apple Keynote almost identically. I’ll take a look at that top spec CPU vs the top spec CPU of the 11″ MacBook Air.

Device

CPU

Power

Cores

Benchmark

2014 MacBook Air 11″

Intel Core i7-4650U

15W Max TDP

2 (4 logical)

4156*

2015 MacBook 12″ Retina

Intel Core M-5Y71

4.5W Max TDP

2 (4 logical)

2780*

* according to cpubenchmark.net

What this shows is the 2014 MacBook Air 11″ in its top spec config scores 66% higher than the 2015 MacBook 12″ Retina. However what it shows me is that trade off has been made in choosing an ultra low powered CPU to maintain battery life whilst giving the user a Retina Display. Remembering, the benchmark used isn’t a real world scenario, its more of a point scoring benchmark and additionally, I have no idea what CPU the new MacBook 12″ Retina actually uses… This is just an intelligent guess. Interestingly again, both CPU’s support up to 16GB Memory, however the configs at Apple top out at 8GB.

Nevertheless if price wasn’t a factor, it’d be really tough to choose an MacBook Air 11″ over a MacBook 12″ Retina. Having a black bezel, retina display, edge to edge keyboard really sells it here for me. I was happy with the existing size of the MacBook Air 11″, but every little helps. Mondays keynote was the first time I truly agreed with and believed Jonny Ive when he said something along the lines of “we’ve really tried to optimise the efficiency of the MacBook’s design as much as possible”.

The next thing that sparked by interest was the inclusion of USB-C for… everything, (for those who don’t know, its a new USB standard that allows power, data + different standards over a single cable). I travel a lot and although my Air rarely runs out of a battery when i’m out of reach of a power outlet, its interesting to think that you could buy a 29$ USB-C to USB cable and potentially charge your MacBook 12″ Retina using the same portable battery pack you use to charge your iPhone / iPad, it is to be confirmed, but i guess it wouldn’t be reaching far to expect this. UPDATE: I can confirm you can charge your MacBook 12″ with a portable battery pack you use for your iPad/iPhone. 🙂

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Those are my initial thoughts beyond the keynote and various tech blog info out there and i’ll try to update this post once my Space Grey top spec MacBook 12″ with Retina Display has arrived and i’ve (with sentiment) retired my trustworthy and fantastic MacBook Air 11″.

Just a quick post to say i’ve posted my first piece of code in over 5 years to GitHub. Its a clever little Objective-C iOS Category on UIViewController that seemlessly overlays a UILabel on every single view controller managed view with the class, nib or storyboard name that is used. Great for debugging old or inherited projects with minefield architectures. It uses some cool libobjc runtime techniques to accomplish this, but implementing the category is a case of dropping it into your project and Build+Go!

Ever wanted to turn your boring netbook into a fully fledged lively Macbook Nano, the worlds smallest Mac OS X powered machine!?! well now you can! The how to below covers all the aspects of getting Mac OS X 10.5.6 Leopard working on your EeePC S101, but should work similarly with any Atom CPU, Intel Chipset Netbook. The best thing about all this is that Mac OS X is IPV6 enabled out the box!

Firstly, the finished product.

Out the box most things work, however once a little tweaking has been done the following are fully working: